We have open threads not just to look at boys and or pets or allow you to rant about my repeated invocation of the feminist cat-lover stereotype, but also so that people can comment on older posts (comments close automatically after two weeks), get in touch with us, or discuss anything else that falls within our comment guidelines. Don’t apologize for being off topic here: there is no required topic, you don’t need to blab about pet products & supplies! (But if you feel really guilty about it, you can link some cute puppy pictures. I won’t complain.)

In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, I paged through a lot of cute pets and boys to bring you some samples, so there’s a few more pictures below the cut:

Sean & Jude via Cute Boys With Cats

@CaduBr2 and Xuxa via Cute Boys With Dogs

Alex and Star Fox :3 via Cute Boys With Cats

I had to look through a lot of pages of the titular cute boys to give you some samples, and I have only one complaint: Where are the cute off-white boys with pets? Definitely more breed diversity for the pets than racial diversity among the boys when I looked.

Edit: Apparently I missed the mark on my attempted satire, so I’ll just put a note here saying that this was *meant* to be a ridiculous post riffing on the feminist cat lover/man hater stereotype and playing with the “let’s dress things up pointlessly with attractive people” trope. Judging from the comments this didn’t work for everyone — sorry about the failed attempt at humour!

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About terriko

Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they're wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won't agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future.
Terri writes/tweets under the name terriko, enjoys making things and mentoring others and has a plain ol' home page at http://terri.toybox.ca.

While commenting this post, Tiferet talked about using “victim rhetoric” argument.
I’d like to ask people opinions/life examples on that and how to answer this argument.
Recently I’ve been on a forum that, from my past experiences through the Intertubes, would be more likely to be feminist or at least aware of what it is. It’s a forum about school, where I know there had been talks about youth rights. In a lot of posts, they use terms such as “feminazi”, “victim rhetoric”, “shaming language” (“the fact mentioning feminism scares you into thinking you are sexist shows a lot, you’ve fallen for their shaming language”), says it’s about “female superiority”, and also use homophobic terms to talk about/qualify feminist men.
One of the forumers posted these videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMFGba7Ckx0
Now, in this video I see a person who acknowledge some privileges (the ones white people have), but perpetuate these privileges using words such as “whitest” to describe feminism. Then I must admit I am white and maybe there is something else I can’t imagine as I didn’t lived/been explained it, but wouldn’t telling others they can’t be feminists if they are people of color make them feel ashamed, therefore doing what he thinks feminists do, just like using homophobic terms for describing feminist men on the forum I’ve talked about? (except in two different manners: first is saying you can’t be X because you’re not in the privileged category, second is saying you are in a less privileged category for being X)
So, most people I’ve seen using “victim rhetoric” argument also believe in other oppression/privileges existence, and that argument is surely also used against anti-racism movements or youth rights somewhere; I note it is only used against a person when this person falls into the oppressed category as when a male talk about feminism he is said to have fallen for feminists’ shaming language and victim rhetoric instead of being said to use it himself.
It seems as a way to “reverse” the thing, putting the privileged person in an oppressed category?
Then, I notice, most language that make me feel ashamed are those who remind me in one way or another I’m “less” than the other person, because I’m in one oppressed/non-privileged in some way or seen as “less” category when this person is in the other category” and that somehow I may be in- or less capable of doing some things. As a member of other privileged categories, I can say I very solely felt ashamed when pointed out there are oppressed/non-privileged people right there; in most case it has been when trying to be inclusive and missing the part.

(Otherwise, I don’t know which language to use to indicate not being member of one random privileged category: unprivileged, non-privileged?)

People in privileged groups react badly to having some of their privilege taken away in an obvious form such as affirmative action or political correctness. It just doesn’t seem fair to them. The logic behind the political correctness anger seems to be – I used to be able to say X and I don’t see a problem and would like to keep saying X. I’m irritated I can’t keep doing this thing I like to do.

There is also a lot of the “best person for the job” references in the media, which I think oversimplifies the issue. Often there is no one singular best or most qualified person for a job and that above a certain level of qualified-ness that each person would do the job equally well.

I’m not opposed to websites like the above existing, since those posting the photos are presumably doing so with the consent of those photographed, or (in the case of the animals), at least without their refusal.

But how is this post relevant to Geek Feminism and its stated goal “to support, encourage, and discuss issues facing women in geek communities”?

I’m afraid it undermines that goal. (For example, if I were to stumble across this blog today and see this as one of the front page articles, I’d probably not take it seriously, which would be unfortunate since there’s a ton of great content on this blog.)

Sorry you didn’t like the post! The point of the open threads is to have something a little lighter and sillier than our regular stuff, so when I got the link from a friend I thought it’d be fun to do a ridiculous picspam riffing on the stereotype of feminists loving cats (and hating men), but I guess I didn’t quite manage to convey that. Oh well, I’ll try to think of something a little more obviously related next time!

– Would you post pictures of “cute girls with pets” on Geek Feminism? Probably not — people would complain that it objectifies women. This is pretty similar. (And wouldn’t you reject, on the grounds of being creepy, comments that referred to those women as “hot”?)

– This post assumes that readers are attracted to young, (as you note) mostly white men. And that we enjoy looking at pictures of them.

– This post trivializes feminism. I’m not saying you can’t be feminist and look at pictures of “cute boys” — but do it outside of public feminist spaces like this blog. People have enough misconceptions about feminism already — don’t make them think that when feminists get together we are talking about cute boys.

Sorry you didn’t enjoy the post! As I said above, it was meant to be a riff on the feminist cat lover/man hater stereotype, and yes the invocation of the “look, cute boys!” to parallel the “look, hot women!” problem was intended to be ridiculous. But I guess I played it a little too straight and not obviously enough tongue-in-cheek and missed the mark in the attempted satire.

Edit: awww… I missed out on a chance to respond to this “in character” for the satire.

I’d like to see some editing action going on, since there are definitely places where the writing could be improved and made more consistent, and where more links could be added. As well as, of course, adding more entries (most of the existing list is based on either specific experiences that contributors to the list have had, or on incidents that are documented with URLs).

In general it hasn’t seemed to me like the geek feminism wiki has been a major vandalism target, but I’m slightly worried that the privilege checklist will attract vandalism, since there are definitely people who are unhappy about its existence and some of them have emailed me in the past. I plan to keep watching it regularly, though. And, I hope that the increased ease of adding new content will outweigh the potential risks of vandalism from people who don’t like to see privilege being discussed in public.

So, if you felt like mentioning this in a post, that would be awesome. Thanks!

It’s a little hard for me to see the boxes on the commenting section – they don’t show as having an outline on my screen so it requires a little effort to try to click in the right place to fill them in.

I don’t really like the new theme at all. I liked being able to screen through and read all of the new posts on the same page without having to click back and forth for each. If there is any way to still be able to do this please let me know; I’m a long time geekfeminism.org reader. Thanks!

I prefer to read blogs that way too — which is why I use a feed reader instead of reading directly on many websites. If you don’t already have something set up, you can read the geek feminism blog’s feed on dreamwidth to get approximately the same effect: http://geekfeminism-feed.dreamwidth.org/

@Katherine- I’ve thickened and darkened the border around the comment input fields.

@alicia, for right now, I’ve added Previous/Next post navigation on single posts, so that you can move more easily from post to post without having to go back to the front page. The original theme I was modifying didn’t have those, and I should have thought to add them earlier.

Is there any way to get a flat list of article-plus-summary *with* the number of comments? The RSS feed (just viewed from a browser) is OK (though it loses all the niceties of an actual theme), but I can’t see whether or not it’s worth clicking in for the comments.

(I tend to read from places where I can’t tweak browser settings and am not going to install my own feedreader.)